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I think the time will come when men and women will wonder that they ever found it necessary to form a league to gain for women the right to choose those who make the laws she must obey; when it will be recognized everywhere that woman, man's inferior in some respects, his superior in others, is absolutely his equal in her right to govern herself; when it will be thought absurd that drunkards, fools and reprobates should make the laws they live to break, while only women, classed with children and idiots, should be silent.

(From a speech by the Australian suffragist Marybanke Wolstenholme in 1891, and published verbatim in The Daily Telegraph, cited by Roberts, 1996: 27–28)